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Rediscovering a Town’s Roots, Feet First

CIRCLEVILLE, W.Va. — The Pendleton County Fair, held over four days in July in this tiny, no-stoplight town, had all the trappings of good, clean fun — funnel cake, a ringtoss game, a magician clowning with children from the audience.

A bouncy castle and spinning swing were set up outside the former high school, the Allegheny Mountains rising nearby. Miss Pendleton County Queen and Miss Pendleton Teen were crowned on opening night; the next day, the girls, 19 and 13, loitered in their sashes and sparkling crowns.

There was also, after a two-year absence, a square dance in the un-air-conditioned school gym. A scoreboard announced that this had once been Indians territory, but on this evening, the floor was filled with expert cloggers and eager twirlers, many in bare feet. A little girl in a yellow bonnet spun around with her mother. The band strummed its way through Appalachian songs as callers shouted to circle left, circle right, do-si-do. “Tip your hat and tie your shoe; now your partner’s following you!”

The return of the Pendleton County dance was spurred by the Augusta Heritage Center, a resource for folk life studies out of Davis & Elkins College, about an hour away. The center’s Mountain Dance Trail project has helped organize dances across the state, cultivating tradition county by county. With a nod to the Bourbon Trail in Kentucky and the Crooked Road music trail in Virginia, it is a homegrown effort to revive and brand a West Virginia legacy.

Photo

Square dancing made its return to the Pendleton County Fair in West Virginia this year after a two-year absence. The dance drew young and old, including Veronica Van Doren of Athens, Ohio, above.Credit
Dustin Franz for The New York Times

There is no better way to get to know the locals in “a little out-of-the-way town” than to dance with them, said Gerald Milnes, the folk arts coordinator at Augusta who came up with the idea for the trail. And if you’re lucky, he said, “you get offered a drink out at the truck.”

Larry Arbaugh, 71, who described himself as a retired sawmill man, started square dancing in grade school in Circleville, where he still lives. “I think it just gets in your blood,” he said. He offered a welcoming hand to newcomers at the gym.

Much of the talk among Mr. Arbaugh’s friends was of other dances in other places — Maggie Valley, N.C., known as the clogging capital of the world, or the Canaan Valley nearby. They used to have a square dance there, said Don Nelson, 68, a retired telescope operator, “but you had to fight your way in.”

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Circleville, W.Va., is part of the Mountain Dance Trail.Credit
The New York Times

Not so Circleville, an unincorporated area with fewer than 350 households about three and a half hours from Washington. “The nice thing about a county like this,” Mr. Nelson said, talking about dancing but not only that, is that “if you screw up, they’ll straighten you right out.”

The Mountain Dance Trail began this year as an oral history project. Through the AmeriCorps program, Mr. Milnes hired Becky Hill, 23, an alumna of Davis & Elkins, and with money from a Kickstarter fund and some small state grants, the two traveled along Route 33, which runs east to west across the state, interviewing the oldest square dance callers they could find, documenting their dance styles and histories.

“The reason we did interviews was to capture these stories, about the boozing and the drinking and the fighting,” Ms. Hill said. “What makes this dance so important is not just a dance move, but everything that’s around that, that makes it alive.”

“It’s like regional identity for a lot of the folks around here,” she added. “They grow up with the fiddle music and the banjo music, and dancing in their homes. It’s part of who they are.”

Video

Reviving the Square Dance

Melena Ryzik visits a West Virginia county fair to take a fresh look at an old Appalachian tradition.

At the dance, Ellen Ratcliffe, 65, a retired banker from Monterey, Va., showed off her skills as a flatfooter, which uses the heel instead of the toe, and involves stepping on every beat. “It’s very personal. You just let your feet be the melody and go with that.”

Not everyone was so accomplished. “Excuse me, are you interested in cakewalking?” a young man asked a young woman sitting on the side. “I’m not very good,” he offered, by way of enticement. Up she went.

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The young man, Dominick Pugliese, a camp counselor from Maryland had brought 13 teenage campers to Circleville after one of them saw a flier for the Dance Trail. The highlight of the trip, he said, “It’s hard to be really awful at square dancing.”

For locals, the resurrection of the community square dance — and the presence of young people — were a welcome sight.

“I had a dance in Upper Tract back in June,” said Dana M. Keplinger, 62, a resident of that unincorporated area, high up in the mountains. “There hadn’t been a dance in that old schoolhouse since probably I was a kid. And it was packed.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 1, 2012, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Rediscovering A Town’s Roots, Feet First. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe